


Everything I love Gets Lost in Drawers

by desperately_human



Category: Schouwendam 12
Genre: Blood, F/M, Hurt No Comfort, I CANNOT let go of these characters I love them very much, M/M, Miscarriage, Sophie & Narrator, Spoilers for whole show, Suicide Referenced, This Is Sad, after which everything gets even worse, all the triggers from ep10 i guess?, for all3 of you who have seen it, it's a TV show if that helps you tag it, partly obviously my own headcanons, sibling relationships, takes place basically during missing scenes in the flashback in ep10, the narrator doesn't have a name so I named him felix reasons in notes, umm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:55:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25036579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/desperately_human/pseuds/desperately_human
Summary: ALL SPOILERS This is a combination of extending the scene where Sophie has the miscarriages in the flashbacks because that seems Really Important, and a bunch of inset flashbacks to better times in Narrator and Sophie's lives. Also kind of a deeper exploration of why/how this relationship is so important that Sophie and Narrator wreck their lives to make things right, because I love that. The point where it all falls apart beyond repair.
Relationships: Olaf Witte/Narrator, Sophie/Olaf Witte
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	Everything I love Gets Lost in Drawers

**Author's Note:**

> this is for Frobisher, who needs to GET AN AO3 ACCOUNt, because I love you more than anything and also want you to suffer

When she doubled over by the graveside he thought, me too. Thought that it was another time when they were feeling the same thing, the pain that threatened to rip him apart, the wish that maybe it just would and have done with it. He had his arms around her torso, swinging her limp body side to side, like he did when they were children, so her knees wouldn’t touch the dirty ground. It was only when he saw the blood, tracing the seam of her stocking to pool on her shining black shoes, that he realized. That was wrong, Sophie who never allowed a hair out of place unless she’d brushed it that way herself, Sophie wouldn’t let her shoes get messy like that. He wanted to take them off her, for a second, before it all sunk in, like the time when she was ten and clawed holes in her favorite red sweater as she tore at her skin to make the vicious feelings stop, and afterward cried for hours holding the red cashmere all ripped to bits, and after that he hid all of her most favorite, most breakable things when she was in a temper. Then he felt understood how still she was in his arms, that two times holding heavy, bleeding bodies was too much for a lifetime let alone a week, and dragged her towards the car not caring that her designer shoes slipped off into the grass.

“Hospital,” he said, bundling her shaking body not the car—she was so light, too easy to pick up and swing around. He said it and hated the sound of word, the thought of those sterile, mint-green halls. That they might take her away from him, like they had wheeled Olaf away wet with bathwater and blood, pushed them back even as they said, overlapping and confused, _but he’s ours._

“No hospital,” Sophie sat up straighter, let a whimper slip out, gripped the edge of the seat.

“But—” the car idled under them, he couldn’t make himself turn the wheel one way or the other.

“No. Hospital.” Her words came staccato, broken by shuddering breaths, by terrible soft noises in her throat. “Just fucking. Take me. Home.” People said she was fragile, his sister, who he’d seen tear apart sheets clenched in her teeth until her gums bled. They said it like they thought that fragile equaled weak.

She tore off her funeral clothes, the suit that used to be for her most important meetings, tossed them in a pile by the door. Let blood stain the hardwood, let them get on their knees and scrub and scrub and never get it out. She tucked her knees to her chest in the magnificent bathtub, shivering still in her pressed white shirt.

Three days before, they had tumbled out of a taxi from the hospital, dizzy from lack of sleep and from having to tell each other over and over that it was true, that it was forever. The door slammed shut in a vacuum of wind from the street, and the sound had echoed through the rooms in a way it never did before, and they looked at each other and wondered how the flat could already sound so empty. Sophie curled up on the bed and he fell next to her, watching her glazed-open eyes, realizing that after three years he had already forgotten what Lucas’—Olaf’s—breathing sounded like and now he would never remember. Sophie gasped when she opened the bathroom door, cold water dancing with an oil-slick of blood. In the end he couldn’t do it, knew that it made no sense, couldn’t let go of the idea that Olaf needed that blood, that maybe they could get it back to him. It was Sophie who pulled the plug, and even if it isn’t true he thinks of this as the first time her failed to protect her.

She was in the bathtub again, bleeding and sobbing, and he sat behind her with his arms around her torso, cold porcelain between them, breathing together. He didn’t know how this was supposed to work, how much blood was too much, how long it would take. The fabric of her sleeve crushed between her teeth, the screams clawing at his throat; it took _so long_.

Their first day back, he had filled the stand-alone tub and physically pushed Olaf in first, where he washed off weeks’ worth of grime from the road, laughed with quiet delight at such an excess of warm water, their soft white towels, Sophie’s rose-vanilla bath oil. _Is this your real life? What the hell were you doing backpacking through Argentina when you could have this?_ Shut up, he grinned and felt the expanding balloon in his chest, this was the first day of forever and it was all going to be okay. He sat on the edge of the tub and pulled off Olaf’s wire glasses with one hand while he poured the rose-water over his head and laughed at his splutters.

Sophie’s body spasmed and she pushed his arms away, falling forward to wrap herself around her knees, eyes fixed on the blood and everything else swirling away down the drain. He couldn’t breathe, suddenly, as if her sobs had been teaching his lungs how to work, he stood up and couldn’t feel his legs. They were going to raise the child, with Sophie’s red hair and Olaf’s soft eyes, and if she has Sophie’s temper and her tears he would be there to hold her and weather it out, and they would tell her that her father was kind and funny, was a weird, creative, total fucking nerd and the best person in the whole world. His whole family was coming apart, everyone he loved washing down the pipes, the dykes, out to the ocean where it’s so very easy to lose things. He shouted, slamming the heels of his hands against the polished counter again and again until the seams of his palms broke open and he could breathe again, could add the blood running down his wrists to theirs.

Sophie leaned against the door frame in her silk dressing gown as he and Olaf brush their teeth over the sink; asked Olaf about weekend plans, about whether he likes goat cheese or blue cheese better, as he tried to answer through a mouthful of toothpaste. She grinned and skipped away to make breakfast as he jumped up to sit on the marble counter and Olaf cupped water from the sink to swish in his mouth. _Your sister’s…a lot,_ Olaf said, half blushing. _She likes you,_ he answered, grinning at Olaf’s face. _It’s okay. If you like her too,_ he lost his way, not sure how to explain to someone else something that had been so obvious his whole life, _we share things._ Olaf titled his head, eyes thoughtful behind his wide glasses, as he casually pulled on his shirt for a kiss. _Stay here,_ he thought, making a childish wish with his eyes squeezed shut, _be our family._

He knocked softly and pushed open the bathroom door, Olaf looked up in surprise as though he had forgotten they lived in a glass house without boundaries, smiled and set his chin back on Sophie’s head. He leaned on the doorframe, forgetting what he had come in for, and marveled at how well their bodies fit together, how Sophie let her eyes close and her shoulders relax, for once not wound tight ready for an attack. He wiped steam from the mirror to fix his tie, watched them reflected over his shoulder, thought _I love you_ and pulled the fabric too tight around his neck with clenched fists at the intensity of the feeling.

The daylight slipping through the heavy blinds faded into night, but neither of them could move to turn on a lamp. It didn’t matter, he thought, he knew Sophie’s breathing, her shape, her pain, with his eyes closed. Somewhere else in the building the elevator doors opened, voices carried on a hushed argument, enunciating the consonants hard through their whispers, the smell of curry drifted through the walls. Sophie let her head drop back onto his shoulder, he tightened his arms around her stomach, as if he could hold her together, bloody handprints on her starched blouse.

He had been twenty-three when they bought the flat, and Sophie twenty-one, fresh out of university with a first in finance and a life plan. Their parents had given her the token check for the first month’s rent at her graduation party, a paper promise for their assurance that they would pay for her to live anywhere in the city, and then taken him aside to say _We don’t want her to live alone. Please take care of your sister_ as if they needed to say it, as if they trusted neither of them really. They had shopped around, Sophie with very specific idea of what she wanted, him just glad to be out of the townhouse he had shared with four fellow out-of-work drama majors. She had yelped in delight at the standalone, footed bathtub in the shining black-and white bathroom. Their home would have a color scheme, she had already told him, and standing in the doorway watching Sophie, with her red hair and her black dress, climb fully clothed into the dry tub and tilt back her head to smile at him upside down, he started to understand what _home_ meant.

Sophie had been still for slowly drifting seconds, for long enough that the blood on his hands was crusting over, and then she screamed again as if she was being torn apart. He held her tight, not caring if it made it harder to breathe, wondered if he could squeeze tight enough that they might become one whole person.

**Author's Note:**

> That's my thing. I hope it was deeply upsetting. I actually have written so much about these people might post more one day idk.  
> So hear me out: it was really a struggle to write fics when one of my main characters didn't have a name. therefore: Felix, decently common Ditch name, and it's a virtue name as well Sophie comes from wisdom in Greek and Felix from luck in Latin (oh boy that's a cruel irony I hate it.) They're also both European/English-friendly names, because I think their parents are the kind of people who expected them to do well in an international economy. I have so many things to say about their parents. Sophie has always been intense and emotional and also really efficient. Come yell at me if you want to talk about backstory.  
> The title in from a song by The National because.


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